In the automated production of cookies, crackers and similar baked items, typically the cookie dough, etc. is deposited on a wide oven conveyor belt in small, uniform quantities in a regularly spaced array of dough dollops or balls, as by wire cutting the dough as the dough is extruded from a plurality of nozzle openings. Typically the dough balls are arranged in about 21 parallel rows on the oven conveyor belt with the dough balls being staggered in adjacent lines along the length of the oven belt so as to place the maximum number of dough balls on the oven belt for a given length of the belt. The oven belt carries the dough balls through an open ended oven which can be 250 to 300 feet long When the dough balls emerge from the oven, the cooking process is completed Another wide cookie conveyor belt system receives the cookies from the oven conveyor and carries the hot baked cookies beyond the oven through a cooling system to cool the cookies. The cooling conveyor deposits the cookies on individual conveying lines for the separate primary processing stations. The equipment in the processing stations, as for example an enrober or a packaging machine of the type disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,712,356, further process the cookies by coating the cookies with chocolate, or by placing the cookies in a cookie tray, etc. Typically, a primary processing station will handle three lines of cookies on individual narrow parallel conveyor belts. Therefore, several processing stations are required for handling the multiple rows of cookies delivered from the oven.
A problem which frequently arises with such a system is that when a primary processing station for one of the lines of cookies becomes inoperative, a steady stream of cookies is being produced by the oven but not processed. Since a cookie oven typically cooks several lines of cookies, i.e. 15-21 lines of cookies simultaneously, it would not be practical to shut down the oven when only one primary processing station has become inoperative, as this would require shutting down the remaining 12-18 rows of cookies headed for fully operational processing stations.
Also, it is not practical to shut down only the conveying lines leading to the inoperative processing station, as by stopping the depositing of dough on the three rows of cookies leading to the inoperative processing station, because the back-log of cookies in the system travelling through the oven, the cooling conveyor and on the other conveying lines is too large.
In the past, a solution to this problem was to continue running all of the lines of cookies through the oven and to the processing stations. Those cookies which were not processed were then dumped off the conveying lines and typically either thrown away as waste or hand packed or fed by hand through a secondary processing station.
In recent years, systems have been developed for automatically diverting cookies and like products from a conveying line to a standby processing station when a primary processing station for the cookies has become inoperative. Such systems generally have included a means for tilting the three infeed conveyor belts that lead to the inoperable processing station downwardly into alignment with a wide standby conveyor belt. The standby conveyor belt is positioned below and moves typically in the same direction as the direction of movement of the processing line and is generally as wide as the entire processing line. The standby conveyor belt has an angled guide plate which extends diagonally across the direction of movement of the standby conveyor belt. When the cookies are to be diverted from an inoperative processing station, the three adjacent conveyor belts carrying cookies toward the inoperative processing station tilt downwardly into alignment with the standby conveyor belt and the cookies pass onto the standby conveyor belt. As the cookies move with the standby conveyor belt, the angled guide plate sweeps the cookies laterally toward the processing conveyor of the standby processing station.
Such a system works well as long as only a single line of cookies is diverted at a time. However, when multiple lines of cookies are to be diverted, there is a tendency for the cookies being swept laterally by the angled guide plate to become accumulated with no space between them in a random collection which is not compatible with the standby processing station. Thus, the cookies cannot be automatically processed by the standby processing station.
Accordingly, it can be seen that it would be desirable to provide a method and apparatus for diverting multiple lines of cookies being transported on an automated processing line to a standby processing station when the primary processing station for the cookies has broken down and become inoperable and for maintaining the cookies in an orderly arrangement as they are delivered to the standby processing station.